Prime Minister Mark Carney with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and U.S. President Donald Trump at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 5, 2025.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
It’s nice that U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen got a few cheers in Canada for taking U.S. officials to task for their insults. But it’s the injury that is the real problem.
Ms. Shaheen snapped back at U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who had recently said his Canadian counterparts “suck” and complained during a Senate subcommittee hearing last week that liquor stores in Canada won’t sell American booze.
“They won’t do it because of the insults from this President and comments like yours,” Ms. Shaheen retorted.
Sure, U.S. President Donald Trump’s 51st-state gibe fired up Canadian emotions enough that the public cried out for responses like the liquor snub. But the trash talk isn’t the real Canada-U.S. problem, and the U.S. Congress isn’t doing much about that.
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The injury isn’t simply the tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on Canadian goods. It’s that there’s a President with the explicitly predatory intent of harming Canada, who hopes to close Canadian auto-assembly plants and tells steel producers they can avoid sky-high U.S. tariffs if they open plants in the United States.
Above all, it’s that Mr. Trump reneged on the trade deal he signed in 2018 and now is asking for concessions from Canada before he even talks about reviewing it. The U.S. political system has barely raised a feeble objection to all that.
The soon-to-retire Ms. Shaheen, from New Hampshire, is one of a handful of U.S. lawmakers who regularly defend the Canada-U.S. relationship, but you don’t hear many objecting to the shift in the ground. A deal is not a deal with the United States.
Mr. Trump’s first administration insisted on weakening the dispute-resolution mechanisms in the negotiations that replaced the North American free-trade agreement with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Separately, it gummed up the World Trade Organization’s appeals body, so the U.S. wouldn’t be bound by its rulings.
Joe Biden’s administration didn’t change that. Republicans and Democrats don’t want to fight to re-create a system where they are bound to trade commitments.
That adds a conundrum for Canada and Mexico in this year’s USMCA review. It can’t really be about buying trade peace - the way they expected it would be in 2018, when they agreed to the USMCA.
Despite the USMCA, Mr. Trump still imposed tariffs of Canadian steel, aluminum and autos last year on national-security grounds, under Section 232 of the U.S. Trade Expansion Act.
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In fact, the USMCA had come with a Canada-U.S. side letter that was supposed to protect the Canadian auto sector against such Section 232 tariffs on vehicles assembled in Canada. But the U.S. imposed tariffs on the non-U.S. content of those vehicles, anyway.
Now, with the USMCA coming up for review, we can expect the Trump administration to insist the deal is not good enough. Mr. Lutnick said recently that Mr. Trump thinks it is a bad deal - even though he was the President who signed it. The U.S. will be demanding concessions and, if the first Trump term is any guide, threatening to withdraw from the agreement.
The Globe and Mail reported last week that the Trump administration has already sought to have Canada make concessions before it sits down to negotiate.
But accepting now is the path to more concessions later. That will be the U.S. approach for the foreseeable future.
There will pressure on Prime Minister Mark Carney to make a deal to buy peace, to end uncertainty. The better path to lessening uncertainty is waiting to see if Mr. Trump will eventually want some peace for himself.
The prospects for that won’t be strong in June and July, when we can expect Mr. Trump to insist he holds all the cards. He will be looking for new concessions.
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But his own political terrain is shifting, with an unpopular war and cost-of-living concerns as he heads into U.S. midterm elections where Republicans might lose control of the House of Representatives.
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has outlined a series of Canadian trade irritants and said that the U.S. baseline case is that the USMCA has to be changed - but he also noted that the agreement established a series of necessary, practical pillars for Canada-U.S. trade.
A Trump administration with other political concerns might have fewer demands because it wants to claim a victory. That’s what happened in the 2018 USMCA talks.
In the meantime, making concessions now means more concessions later. There’s no buying trade peace with the U.S. now. There’s only renting.